Bump: Mother Of All Bunker Busters Detonated

Boeing issued a press release today, crowing about the detonation of company’s new, ginormous bomb. DANGER ROOM’s David Hambling had the lowdown on the test, ten days back…

The U.S. just detonated an absolutely enormous bomb, in an underground test: a king-sized bunker-buster, six times larger than what’s currently in the American arsenal.

No, it’s not the famed Divine Strake, but something else entirely…
You may remember the GBU-43 MOAB – Massive Ordnance Air Burst (or ‘Mother Of All Bombs’) the 21,000-pound megabomb that was wheeled out before Operation Iraqi Freedom. Now MOAB is to get an even bigger sibling, the MOP, or Massive Ordnance Penetrator.

It’s a 30,000-pound weapon, designed to strike targets too deep or too hard for the biggest bunker-buster America’s got, the 5,000-pound BLU-113. It can go through some 22 feet of concrete or over 100 feet of earth. MOP will go a lot deeper – 200 feet of 5,000 psi concrete.

MOP pulls it off by not being all that explosive – less than 20% by weight, compared to almost 90% for the MOAB. That’s because bunker-busting bombs need very thick casings to survive the effects of impact.

In any case, the MOP test of "a statically emplaced conventional weapon within a DTRA [Defense Threat Reduction Agency] test tunnel" involved over 5,300 pounds of explosives. The type was not stated, but it’s possible that it’s a thermobaric mixture like that used in the BLU-118 "cave buster." This type of explosive produces a sustained blast which travels much more effectively through underground complexes, as the blast reportedly ‘flows’ around corners. To say that over two and a half tons of it would do a tremendous amount of damage in a confined space is something of an understatement.

But, unlike competing technologies MOP is very simple and won’t take much work – you just need a big enough plane to carry it (a B-2 should do).

Sometimes you don’t need to actually use a weapon. MOAB was only a prototype, but the video of the test was a potent propaganda weapon. MOP is being funded (to you, $30 million) by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA),which
“safeguards America and its allies from weapons of mass destruction by providing capabilities to reduce, eliminate, and counter the threat, and mitigate its effects.” In other words, it’s aimed at WMD sites, especially those dug too deep for the BLU-113. Perhaps this test is a really signal to someone that their deep bunkers are not deep enough.

UPDATE: Every picture tells a story; the interesting thing about this one above is not how big the MOP warhead is, but how small.

Assuming the man standing next to it is around six feet tall and about the same distance from the camera, I make the volume of the thing about 1100 liters at most. This for 5,300 lb of explosive. That gives a density of well over 2 Kg/liter, which is very high.
(RDX is 1.8).

That suggests a metalized explosive, one with a significant amount of powdered aluminum (density 2.7) added. Not necessarily thermobaric as such, but at least ‘metal augmented’ and with much the same effect of producing a powerful and prolonged blast.

This is going to such out the oxygen from a fairly large space – and produce one hell of a bang.